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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

This little bump stuck out of the bottom of the floor, and I wanted to put a heat shield tight to the body. I decided to hammer it flat.

Nobody was handy to hold a dolly on the back side of the panel, so I put my heel dolly under a sandbag and stacked ~20lb of sand in a bucket on top of that. This held the panel stiff so I could hammer out the lump. Without supporting the back side of the panel, I would have just made a mess and a lot of noise.

It's not perfect, but it's out of the way and will be covered by the heat shield.

Template:

Trial #1. I didn't like the outside corners, and two of my lines were pretty wavy.

This was thrown in the scrap bin just after I snapped a photo.

Trial #2: Get rid of the outside corner steps, and do a better job with the bead roller.

Success!

More heat shield pieces... This section will be above the muffler.

After tipping the flange and bolting it up:

I added a flange to the heat shield section that covers the fuel cell, so I can bolt the two sections together and minize any rattling that might happen. This joint is a TIG fusion welded standing seam.

This style of seam hides the heat affected zone and warping (which is minimal anyway) down inside the joint.

One last little piece

I already had the smaller dimple die, but I made a larger one so I can make nested dimples. This allows me to fasten two panels together without a gap.

They stack pretty nicely, with just enough room between the sheets for the head of a rivet nut.

Speaking of rivet nuts, I installed a handful of these in the body and in the heat shield sections.

All done!

I think I can finally say that the exhaust and heat shields are DONE! I have one section to make in the engine bay, but the vast majority of this project is done. It didn't even take a year!